White
by dramioneshipper
Summary: A story about how love in the simplest of forms is the most beautiful: Love finds lost minds as two former enemies fall in love in an insane asylum.


**Well, I'm in babysitting mode, and I was feeling like writing you guys a little Draco/Hermione fanfiction, and so I thought : « Hey ! Why not update Phoenix's Call?" and then I realized I wasn't home and didn't feel like rewriting the first half of the chapter that I had _already_ written so…Well, I guess it's another one-shot.**

Severe Post-Traumatic-Shock. That's what they tell me. When I look confused, they shake their heads and write notes on their notepads. I say they because they always come in groups. Except when it's a nurse who comes in to call me to dinner. Or lunch. They don't call me for breakfast anymore. They say I can't handle it.

Probably because toast was the last thing I ate as a normal girl.

Toast.

I wonder.

I always thought it would be something like salad. With cucumbers. And mushrooms.

I like mushrooms.

I'd be lying if I said that I didn't fit in here. I do. When Harry and Ron and Ginny come to visit, they look at the people as if they couldn't understand why I was locked in with them. Or rather, why they were locked in with me. They stare at the blank eyes and pale hands of the people wandering the hallways and point out that mine are different.

They're not.

Harry and Ron and Ginny never look me in the eye anymore. They can't know what they look like.

Life is boring now. It's just a long, long stretch of white. White coats, white walls, white beds, and white spoons. We don't have knives or forks anymore. Not since Lilli killed herself.

Lilli was a nice person. She had blond hair and blue eyes. She used to go to a school in France, she told me. BeauxBatons, it was called. She told me about how her parents died in front of her, how the man who killed them made her watch. She laughs when she tells the story. She doesn't remember it hurt her. She tried to forget it, but she only forgot herself.

"Hermione, she tells me with the only expression her eyes can give, sadness: I think I used to live."

Lilli's dead now. She's dead and she's free. Because apparently, that's the only way you can come out of here.

When Lilli died, there was like an empty space. She used to be the one that sat next to me at meals. I was afraid they'd give her place to someone else. They will. They just have to find someone crazy enough to put in here. Someone who's lost his or her mind along the way and who is starting to give up looking for it.

When he came, there was a great big noise. He shouted at the men in white. Shouted for them to leave him alone, to let him go back, that he wasn't crazy, he wasn't crazy at all. I poked my head out of the door to catch a look at him. I met his eyes.

They were gray and raging. He hadn't given up the search for his mind yet. He was crazy all right, he thought he was still sane. The men shot a spell to alleviate him, and then they led him to the men's dorm. I saw his face as he was carried by my door. I knew that face from somewhere.

The next day, he was sitting next to me at lunch. He didn't eat anything. He didn't look at anyone. He just stared into space.

"Excuse me." I piped up.

He turned his head to face me. He narrowed his eyes and said:

"Do I know you?"

"Knew. And did. We talk in the past tense here when talking about the past."

He shook his head.

"I knew you."

"Are you going to eat anything at all?"

He stared at me as I pointed to his untouched food. He looked at me for what seemed like an eternity but was actually a relatively short amount of time. I don't know how many seconds. I don't count the seconds anymore.

And then he slowly shook his head as a tear formed in his eye.

"You can have it."

I smiled at him and grabbed a tomato. I am particularly fond of tomatoes. And Mushrooms.

I like mushrooms.

It was like this at every meal. He would stare into my eyes and say he knew me. I would steal a tomato from him. He never had mushrooms. I think if I had told him I liked them so much he would have taken some. But I didn't talk about myself.

One day he came into my room. He said he was going to take a walk in the courtyard. If I wanted to come. I was brushing my hair, watching it become all sleek and shiny and soft. I said sure.

After that, we walked around the courtyard at least once a day, with a nurse tailing behind us just to make sure we didn't commit suicide on the way to the flower gardens.

He would pick me flowers.

He said his name was Draco, and that he knew me from when I had my mind. He said my mind used to be my best attribute and that once I knew the names of all the flowers in the garden. Then I asked him why he was here.

He got a sad look in his eyes and said that he was here because he had lost his mind too. He lived in the past. He said my being here helped him a lot. I smiled at him. He told me my name was Hermione. I told him I knew. Then he kissed me. And I smiled at him.

We did this a lot, and for a while, I thought I was in love. I knew I was. It was the most beautiful, simplest love in the world. It shone through us with a smile, or a kiss. Maybe because our minds were lost, we didn't overthink things. Maybe because we could remember nothing but ourselves, we didn't stop ourselves for blood or friendship.

And then one day, they found a cure. For what we both had. Draco and I walked hand in hand to the Healer's office. We kissed and promised to each other that we would stay together and be married. He gave me a ring, a simple, gold ring, and I gave him a simple, silver one. Rings that shone with the simplest love in the world.

After this, I never saw him again.

Sometimes I look at the ring on my finger while I'm working as an Auror, and wonder who put it there, and where he is now. I wonder if he has a wife and kids, and if he loves her half as much as he loved me. I don't remember his name, his face. I just remember the way he smiled at me, the way he held me, the way I belonged to him and no one else. I remember how he saved me and I saved him, how we found our minds because we found ourselves.

I remember the white of the walls, and the gray of his eyes. I remember how I found out how to live again.


End file.
